Garbage. I hated reading every word of that Pat. Its disgusting that a little bit of lobbying from the Commercials allows the powers that be to continually abuse rec fishermen. Circle hooks will do NOTHING to stop overfishing. I gut hooked way more bass on eels using circles than octopus hooks...Its also ironic that they post that considering OTW would report on stripers infinitely until they couldn't make money off of the backs of those bass...Soon we'll all be chasing bluefish...
I couldnt agree more Jon.
It doesn't help when Jimmy Fee is doing FB live posts of mega blitzes. The contradiction OTW is, was the reason I only contributed once...
I agree. The one night I got into the stripers really good on eels I was using circle hooks to start and gut hooked way more fish and its impossible to get the circles out once hooked deep. I quickly tied on octopus hook and landed 4 keeper sized stripers, all on the same eel. Once I found my buddies in the boat with the eels I put a fresh eel on and landed a 45 incher. They were all released but the first few with circle hooks had some jewelry in their guts bc I couldn't get the circle hooks out so i figured cutting my line was the next best option. One of my best nights of fishing but was never comfortable being in LI sound at night in a 10 foot sit inside yak.
LOL. that must have been an adventure!
Interesting that the Commercial guys still get to use J hooks as well...As for their statement that: "recreational fishery is the single largest source of fishing mortality (48%)."There is some pretty damning evidence that the commercial industry does a number on it as well.
